Shutting down reactors doesn't save much money; they've already been built. They also weren't built when renewable energy was developed into the very cost-effective solution it is today.
The worst thing about building new reactors using existing technology (which would really no better than the existing ones) is the waste of money compared to alternatives, AND you get all the risk on top of that. Delicious government-subsidized risk.
Those costs are entirely political. Fear mongers have made it extremely difficult to get a nuclear project to completion (see the whole NRC approval process). Solar panels would be super expensive as well if each one had to go through a giant 30 year planning process that NIMBYs could easily disrupt.
>They also weren't built when renewable energy was developed into the very cost-effective solution it is today.
Renewable isn’t cost effective. That’s a lie told to placate people. In reality, renewable currently has no feasible way to replace enough fossil fuels to matter for global warming. Energy storage solutions to bring it into candidacy for base load are so far off the mark that they aren’t even deployed.
Until we have a storage solution that doesn’t 10x+ the cost of renewables, which there is no promise of, we are signing up wholeheartedly for fossil fuels as our electricity backbone (and that doesn’t even address transportation energy where the picture is even more bleak).
Reminder for anyone thinking renewables are so cost effective, here is the energy source breakdown in the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/images/charts/consumptio...
This is simply not true. There has been tremendous ongoing incompetence and mismanagement in the reactor construction process in recent years. You may blame regulation -- that's the goto excuse for pronuclear people to avoid coming to unpleasant conclusions -- but the problem is that reactors are complicated things, and reactors with safety systems are even more complicated things (and reactors without regulation are complicated things that will almost certainly fail in unpleasant ways.) Building complicated things is hard, especially if all the institutional knowledge of how to do it, and the supply chains for the parts, have decayed away.
The huge advantage solar/wind have is they are simple and scalable. Installations consist of thousands, or even millions, of replicated parts. Experience builds up rapidly as the same damned thing is built and installed over and over. Nuclear doesn't have that.
Do you think this is the reason the US Navy doesn’t seem to have major problems getting nuclear power plants built and installed in submarines and aircraft carriers? It’s interesting how civilian power companies have had a bunch of high profile failures in this area but as far as I can tell new warships still seem to be able to get reactors fine.
The A1B being installed on the newest carriers is a 700 MW unit being installed in a pair, so 1.4 GW total. That number seems comparable to a lot of commercial power generation, e.g. Vermont Yankee is a 620 MW plant.
It's about time. Especially in countries that do not posses any reasonable ways of discarding the produced waste as well as countries that have other capabilities to generate power.
This tech IS dangerous. There WAS fallout and you can still find 9000Bq wild animals in the middle of Europe. Not even mentioning the cancer rates all over East Europe here.
So please spare us this overhyped new rush for nuclear.
actually the problem was never the reactor itself. chernobyl never failed because the reactor was totally unsafe. It wasn't the newest, but humans could've prevented anything. fukushima wasn't the unsafest reactor as well. however it got hit by a wave it couldn't stand and after that humans missmanaged everything to safely shut it off.
do you see a common denominator? the problem is that money is always involved even when you can build these things for cheap, however money and humans will make reactors unsafe, not the design of the reactor. at some point somebody wants to save money and most often this money saving practice will then be extremly disastorous.
I'm not saying that nuclear is bad per se, of course the waste is bad, but is it worse than coal? I'm not sure. however as long as humans control or have control over these things they will always be unsafe in a certain way.
See also:
"For every three units of energy produced by the reactor core of a U.S. nuclear power plants, two units are discharged to the environment as waste heat. Nuclear plants are built on the shores of lakes, rivers, and oceans because these bodies provide the large quantities of cooling water needed to handle the waste heat discharge."[0]
[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_technolog...
Solar panels get hot, gas turbines have hot exhausts, coal plants have cooling towers etc.
They all approximate a heat engine, and they must theoretically give off heat to the cold reservoir
For each of those energy sources mentioned, what would happen if the generating station were to be completely inundated with water?